Garageland, Issue 6, Supernatural

The Uncanny.

Bound up in the delightful terror of the sublime, yet strangely different from it, the uncanny has featured in Western literature and art since the late eighteenth century. Experienced as a fleeting moment of perceptual confusion that distorts what is normal or expected, the uncanny imbues reality with uncertainty, evoking intense feelings of anxiety and dread. Freud’s psychoanalytic enquiry into Das Unheimlich (the unhomely) explains that the frightening element comes from the return of something that has been repressed in the unconscious. Certain people, objects, and situations can threaten our understanding of reality and arouse a sense of the uncanny not because they are new or frightening in themselves, but because they are strangely familiar.

The Gothic novel revealed a dangerous pleasure in supernatural terrors that represent the return of the primitive in a modern and secular context. The writers E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allen Poe provoked unease by contrasting a homely interior with an invasive figural embodiment of the uncanny such as the doppelganger or ghostly replica of the self, which symbolised the repressed fear of death. A dialogue between literature and visual art during the Romantic period pushed the domestic interior beyond the bourgeois settings of the seventeenth century towards a psychological space and a site for the uncanny. The architectural fantasies of Giovanni Piranesi’s (1720-1778) Imaginary Prisons resemble moments in a confused dream while Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1825) The Nightmare shocks and intrigues with a sexually charged imagery that explores the murky areas of the psyche where sex and fear meet.

Early modern painting places the viewer in the unconscious by entirely abandoning the realms of the real world. Artists involved with Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism such as de Chirico and Max Ernst located and successfully exploited a disturbing modern uncanny that was held in a state between dreaming and awakening.

The slippage of fantasy into reality continues to fascinate visual artists today: David Lynch delves under the surface of the everyday to expose a dark side of suburban life while contemporary installation and sculpture brings the viewer an architectural embodiment of the uncanny that can be physically experienced. Rachel Whiteread gave material form to the invisible in House (1993), while Gregor Schneider in Haus ur (1985-97) remodelled his family home to create a disorientating labyrinth. By defamiliarising the domestic interior its double nature is revealed, turning the homely into the unhomely.